EGN NEWS DESK
On Wednesday, an public sale home in Europe will put a portray by Gustav Klimt up on the market, with a preauction estimate of no less than 30 million euros (about $32 million).
Whoever buys it can acquire a portray by an artist whose main works not often come up on the market, but additionally a portrait whose topic, provenance and present possession are both unknown, not public or the topic of debate.
The auctioneer promoting the portray is just not a global heavyweight like Sotheby’s or Christie’s, however im Kinsky, an area home in Vienna whose largest sale till now was in 2010: $6.1 million, for a portray by Egon Schiele.
At a information convention in January saying the sale of the mysterious Klimt work, Ernst Ploil, the co-chief govt of im Kinsky, mentioned: “All is at midnight. Whenever there may be an argument for one thing, counterarguments come up repeatedly.”
Some of the talk facilities on the identification of the younger girl portrayed. Other questions have arisen about what occurred to the art work through the Anschluss, when Austria was annexed into the Third Reich.
The portray was owned by a Jewish household throughout that interval, and there aren’t any paperwork that document what occurred to it throughout these years when Austria’s Jewish inhabitants was persecuted, deported and murdered and their possessions plundered by the Nazis.
The questions surrounding the portrait have solely added to the curiosity within the sale of this work by Klimt, one of many founders of the influential Vienna Secessionist motion, whose extremely ornamental work are actually among the many artwork market’s most coveted trophies. Last June at Sotheby’s in London, his “Lady With a Fan” fetched $108.4 million.
The story of this portray, generally known as “Portrait of Fräulein Lieser,” begins in Vienna in 1917, when a teenage daughter of a rich Jewish household made the primary of 9 visits to Klimt’s studio to pose.
Klimt’s pocket book gives a clue, however an unsatisfying one, to the identification of the topic. It information every go to by a “Lis,” signifying a member of the prosperous Lieser household. But Justus and Adolf Lieser, two German-born brothers who based Austria’s first mechanical hemp rope and wire manufacturing unit, every had teenage daughters.
The portrait was by no means completed. Art historians consider the unsigned canvas was in Klimt’s studio when the artist died in 1918, through the influenza pandemic. For many years the portray has solely been recognized from one black-and-white {photograph} that was taken within the Twenties. Afterward, the portrait’s whereabouts was largely unknown.
The public sale home means that “Fräulein Lieser” may probably depict one of many two teenage daughters of Henriette Lieser, who was generally known as Lilly: both Helene, who turned a distinguished economist, or Annie, a celebrated dancer. A member of the Landau household, considered one of fin-de-siècle Vienna’s very wealthiest, Lilly divorced Justus Lieser in 1905 and have become a patron of the Viennese avant-garde.
Im Kinsky’s suggestion relies on a listing card on the detrimental of that previous black-and-white picture of the portray within the Austrian National Library. The card signifies that in 1925, the portrait was hanging in Lilly’s palatial residence in Argentinierstrasse.
Lilly was deported by the Nazis in 1942 and murdered at Auschwitz in 1943, in response to the catalog.
But her daughters survived the Holocaust. Neither is understood to have tried to seek out or declare the Klimt after World War II. And the portray doesn’t seem in Lilly Lieser’s declaration of useful property that each one Jews in Germany and Austria had to attract up for the Nazis in 1938.
However, latest analysis, and articles within the Austrian newspaper Der Standard, help the view that the portrait is considered one of Lilly’s daughters. The articles describe letters from 1961 that had been not too long ago found within the archive of Mumok, Vienna’s museum of recent artwork, that point out the portray at the moment was within the possession of a person named Adolf Hagenauer.
In one letter, Hagenauer is upbraided by a curator and future director of the museum, Werner Hofmann, who accuses him of buying the portrait from a Jew who had “died within the gasoline chambers,” as Lilly had.
During the Anschluss, Hagenauer, the managing director of a household grocery enterprise, was married to the daughter of Lilly Lieser’s butler, in response to analysis by Georg Gaugusch, creator of a 5,000-page historical past in regards to the Jewish upper-middle class in Vienna.
Gaugusch and Olga Kronsteiner, who wrote the Der Standard articles, have raised the likelihood that Lilly traded the portray to Hagenauer for provisions because the persecution of Jews heightened in 1938, the 12 months through which Hagenauer is documented as making use of for membership of the Nazi party.
Hagenauer in the end gave the Klimt to his daughter, in response to Der Standard. The newspaper reported that the daughter died final 12 months, having bequeathed the portray to a distant relative, who’s the undisclosed vendor at this time. Ploil mentioned in an e mail that Der Standard was appropriate on this element.
But two Klimt consultants, Tobias Natter and Alfred Weidinger, say the portray truly depicts a distinct teenage woman: Margarethe Constance Lieser, the daughter of Justus’s brother Adolf and his spouse, Silvia. Adolf died in 1919. Margarethe married the Hungarian Catholic convert Henry de Gelsey in 1921 and moved to Budapest, adopted by her mom in 1938.
Weidinger mentioned in an e mail that in 2007 he had been launched to Margarethe’s son William de Gelsey, an funding banker. He mentioned de Gelsey, who died in London in 2021, with no youngsters, had requested his assist in monitoring the portray.
He was satisfied that Klimt had painted his mom, Weidinger mentioned: “He mentioned there was by no means any doubt about it, as a result of his household at all times talked in regards to the portrait of his mom.”
De Gelsey made a provision in his will for a donation to a Catholic charity if the portray had been rediscovered and bought, however by no means registered the Klimt portrait as lacking on the database of Art Loss Register, which locates and recovers stolen artworks.
Weidinger and Natter mentioned they weren’t approached by the public sale home for his or her opinions on the portray. Natter mentioned in an e mail that “opposite to all worldwide requirements, the public sale home has didn’t contain the 2 main Klimt consultants, each of whom have printed a catalog raisonné.”
Im Kinsky mentioned in an e mail that it had not approached Natter as a result of his views of the portray had been recognized from his catalog, but it surely had consulted no less than three unbiased artwork historians.
Im Kinsky’s public sale catalog says that, as a part of the hassle to promote the portray, its present house owners had acknowledged the “many ambiguities and historic gaps” in its provenance and reached “a good and simply answer” with authorized successors of the Lieser household. This settlement meant that, from a “purely authorized standpoint,” it was “immaterial” who commissioned the portray and which of the three Lieser daughters was depicted.
Ploil mentioned that no matter which Lieser daughter is portrayed, the portray had been unlawfully acquired through the Nazi interval. “Every type of taking away through the Nazi time needs to be handled as illegal,” he mentioned.
When requested if de Gelsey’s nominated charity could be a beneficiary of the public sale, Ploil, who can also be a associate within the Vienna regulation agency Ploil Boesch, mentioned in an e mail that although a confidentiality clause prevented him from commenting on that particular level, “all authorized successors of Adolf, Justus and Henriette Lieser are a part of the settlement.”
Jil Birnbaum, a solicitor on the London regulation agency Wedlake Bell, which handles the de Gelsey property, mentioned that the heirs of William and his brother Alexander, who died in 2006, are included within the settlement.
Under Austrian regulation, authorized agreements between house owners and successors can, in sure circumstances, settle a restitution difficulty as an alternative of the formal return of a looted art work. The work then needs to be granted an export license by the state. The Austrian Federal Monuments Authority issued such a license to the Klimt on Oct. 23, 2023.
“Restitution is a really delicate difficulty, and we have now to analysis loads and be very correct in regards to the data,” mentioned Erika Jakubovits, govt director of the presidency of Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien, the Jewish Community of Vienna.
“Only the rightful heirs ought to be those to settle with,” Jakubovits mentioned. “A authorized opinion on the heirs ought to be ready earlier than beginning settlement procedures,” she added, alluding to what she views as remaining questions on who’re the authorized heirs to “Portrait of Fräulein Lieser.”
Though the newest analysis reported in Der Standard takes the view that the Lieser woman is prone to be Helene, the long run economist, Ploil mentioned in an e mail that it was essential to not go too far in particularly figuring out the topic of the portrait at this junction.
He famous that attorneys for the de Gelsey household “nonetheless persist with their opposite opinion that Adolf Lieser has commissioned the portray — exhibiting Margarethe Lieser and never Helene.”
Because of the inconclusiveness, Ploil mentioned, “the catalog is not going to be modified or amended.”
Natter, the Klimt scholar, mentioned the identification of the woman had wider penalties. “The identification is essential because it permits us to return to the commissioner and tells us loads in regards to the provenance and possession historical past,” he mentioned. “It actually does make a distinction.”
